Peach Picks: Two Things to Read This Week

Last Friday we published “10 things you should probably know about me before you sleep over at my house” by Olivea Wiggins at Peach. Wiggins’s poem takes the form of the numbered list promised in the title and it expertly disarms the reader with the playfulness of its initial implications. “4. I will always offer the bigger couch. / partly because I want to be a good host, / but mainly because the smaller couch makes me curl up into a smaller ball. / Contracting knees into chest, / arm onto arm, / body into body until I become less than one.” The poem echoes the natural transition out of childhood in its lines, portraying it as a slow hollowing out, like the gradual dissipation of a classroom. “8. I will sleep for maybe 3 hours / and spend most of the night watching infomercials, / too frozen in place to reach for the remote. / Because 4, I am a trapped in a half shell of a body, / remember? / Crying partly because I’m yawning / and partly because even the strongest dams have to let some water through.” Wiggins’s poem is moving in the way it portrays loneliness and uncertainty, not as forces to be avoided or conquered, but as natural emotional wave lengths tuning in and out of our lives.

IN PRINT​:You Are in Nearly Every Future​ by Noah Falck

Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 29 pages

You Are in Nearly Every Future ​is the new chapbook-length poem from Buffalo-based poet and education director of Just Buffalo Literary Center, Noah Falck. ​You Are in Nearly Every Future carries with it the feeling of a party that has long passed or a dream that’s grown hazy in the din of the alarm clock. It feels like an apt poem with which to close out the tumultuous year of 2017, as more and more things seem to reach their conclusion with only a foreboding sense of what may come next. “tonight as a common / cold, a common cold / you mimic on the dance floor / how you declare / war on silence / on the side effects / of love on the suburbs / sprawling through you / and everyone who / saw this coming, / saw this coming.” Falck offers up tenderness and understanding in the face of some unknown encroaching darkness, and though it’s suggested that the worst hasn’t yet come, you can feel the warm weight of hope in every line: “you hold me closer / than ever before / you say the word ​earth​ / as if it has already ended.”

Peach Picks” is a column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of ​Peach Mag​,​ ​an online literary magazine based in Buffalo. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.